Paul Farrell is out with another rather dismal outlook on the financial system (better known in the vernacular as the feloneous Ponzi scheme), and how while the immediate causes of the crash, and its disastrous aftermath, which benefits only the upper class at the expense of everyone else, are certainly a function of the current and previous administration, one has to look further back to see the flawed foundations on which everything is built. As far back as Reagan, in fact, and his eponymous Reaganomic doctrine according to Farrell. "Was their Reaganomics ideology so rigid, so blinding, they couldn’t (and
still cannot) admit they were wrong? Forcing them to lie to America?
Cover up the lies? The evidence is clear.

Today, a harsh lesson from history, facts and a warning. Listen closely
America. It’s already happening again. The collective Reaganomics Brain
has gone from crash to cover-up to comeback kid to
capitalism-for-the-super-rich in three short years. Now with absolute
power over America." Sure enough, Farrell sees the events of 2008/9 as only the first step in the unwind of Reaganomics. Step two is coming, and it will be the final end of not only the Great Moderation experiment started in the early 80s, but, luckily, of that organization at the heart of it all: the Federal Reserve.

The worst is yet to come. The forces behind the 2008 crash are stronger today. Like the villain in a horror-flick sequel, the dark side is now hungrier. Phase 2 is already in full swing as the Reaganomics Brain aggressively races to complete unfinished business — the 2008 meltdown — which will implode Wall Street banks and the Fed, ending the reign of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency

Recently we reported some bearish predictions for 2011 by two respected market leaders: Ned Davis warns of a “midyear peak” before a new cyclical bear. Jeremy Grantham warns investors to get out before Christmas. Market Crash 2011: It will hit by Christmas.

Bad news for investors angry at the past, worried about the future. Remember, the Dow’s barely above its best 2000 level of 11,722. Adjusted for inflation, the market has flatlined the past decade.

Here are the incremental catalysts that have lead us to where we are now:

America’s boomers don’t have to be rocket scientists to see the workings of the Reaganomics Brain here, how it’s destroying capitalism, democracy and their retirements. Here’s hard evidence of lies and cover-ups in past and future catastrophes:

March 2004. Fed Chairman Greenspan ‘cover-up’ of coming crash

In a Bloomberg Market’s magazine column last year, “Greenspan Cover-up,” Roger Lowenstein, author of “The End of Wall Street,” wrote that in a newly released transcript of a March 2004 meeting Greenspan “argues against disclosing too much to the public lest the Fed ‘lose control of a process that only we fully understand’.” Yes, a cover-up.

Lowenstein was classy, but went ballistic: “This statement ranks as a sign of monumental arrogance. It was Greenspan himself who didn’t understand, much less ‘fully understand,’ that the Fed’s lax mortgage regulation and easy monetary policies were setting America up for a disastrous fall.”

Then the indictment: “Had the Fed publicized such concerns, it might have led to a crackdown and forestalled millions of bad mortgages that would be written over the following 2 1/2 years. Instead, the Fed released minutes with sanitized phrases that had been stripped of alarming language.” Lying by omission, then a cover-up.

Now ask yourself: Was Greenspan so blinded from being inside the myopic echo chamber of the collective Reaganomics Brain for so many years that he, like all other insiders, is forced to lie, then cover up the lies?

Aug 2006. New Treasury secretary in ‘cover-up’ of crash dead ahead

As a postscript to the meltdown, Bloomberg later reported that back in August 2006, a month after Henry Paulson left Goldman Sachs as CEO with a net worth of over $500 million to become the new Treasury secretary, he spoke to the White House staff at Camp David: “Paulson held up over-the-counter derivatives as an example of financial innovation that could, under certain circumstances, blow up in Wall Street’s face and affect the whole economy.”

Reminds us of Warren Buffett’s famous reference to derivatives a “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

Cover-up? Conflict of interest? You bet. America’s Treasury secretary had the facts, but never warned the public. Worse: Instead, happy talk and lies from Paulson, covering up the risks. More than anyone in America, as Goldman’s CEO, Paulson knew about all about the deadly risks in the $500 trillion global derivatives casino, from years building Goldman’s derivatives business.

Worse: Later, when we learned about Goldman’s cover-up in failing to disclose to its own investors its double-dealing with AIG and hedge fund shorting, Paulson’s conflict of interest became clearer. He should have disclosed the risks, yes, had a duty to warn America, but instead refused to share, chose instead to lie and cover up for years.

July 2007. Paulson and Bernanke ‘cover up’ crash after it began

Cover-up? Lie? America’s Treasury Secretary? Yes, a cover-up at the top. One year after becoming Wall Street’s Trojan Horse on the inside of Washington, as the meltdown spread rapidly across Wall Street, this guy with the keys to trillions of the American taxpayer’s retirement money, could have come clean. But instead he was locked into the collective Reaganomics Brain ideology, forced to perpetuate the cover-up.

Yes, Paulson could have told the truth to the American public, to investors and taxpayers, but instead Paulson told Fortune magazine: “This is far and away the strongest global economy I’ve seen in my business lifetime.”

What a whopper. Part of the bigger overall cover-up of the collective Reaganomics Brain ideologues, for during these pre-meltdown years, Paulson, Greenspan and new Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke were regaling America with happy-talk about the subprime mortgage crisis being “contained,” just “regional froth.”

October 2008. Meltdown, then Paulson cons a clueless Congress

America’s Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson was Wall Street’s man on the inside in the fall of 2008 just before the presidential election.

He failed America when the derivative markets collapsed, by conning Congress into protecting his Wall Street buddies with cash, credits and sweetheart deals, even though they were insolvent, virtually bankrupt and had no negotiating power.

Cover-up? Yes, the Reaganomics Brain ideologues were inside, running America for Wall Street’s benefit rather than the American taxpayer. Paulson’s old buddies were all well-protected — to be paid out of retirement monies from America’s boomers.March 2011. Greenspan leading new Reaganomics resurgence

The Reaganomics Brain that’s ruled America for the past generation is making a swift comeback as the dominant political ideology favored by Wall Street. Last week Bloomberg news put this dangerous resurgence in the spotlight, in effect confirming that the worst of the 2008 meltdown was never completed, historical lessons never learned, and that another crash — like the aftershock of a deadly earthquake — is coming soon to complete the unfinished business.

Here’s why: Bloomberg just reported on a Greenspan’s article in International Finance magazine. He’s not only defending his legacy with renewed allegiance to the ultra-conservative Reaganomics Brain dogma that sustained him for 18 years; Greenspan now blames Obama’s Keynesian policies for the slow recovery. Listen:

Greenspan’s “conclusions fit with his long-held free-market ideology.” He warns “a surge in U.S. government ‘activism,’ including fiscal stimulus, housing subsidies and new regulations, is holding back the economic recovery.” But like Paulson and the rest of this Reaganomics Brain resurgence, there’s no acceptance of his personal past in the meltdown, only blame.

Greenspan sees the problem with the recovery of the American economy as the Democrats failure to embrace free market, deregulation and massive tax cuts, not Greenspan’s failed monetary policies, not Bush’s costly preemptive wars, not Cheney’s belief that “deficits don’t matter.”

What comes next is nothing short of the second revolution per Farrell:

Back in an early 2008 quarterly letter to investors, Jeremy Grantham, whose GMO firm manages $100 billion worldwide, said the warning signs of a coming crash were everywhere. But few listened.

As Grantham put it, “the three or four dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.” Past and future. Why? It’s a brain defect, trapped in our DNA, overriding our rational abilities.

Worse, the new Reaganomics ideologues like Bernanke, the GOP, Tea Party, even Obama, are now marching in lockstep, embracing Reaganomics, squashing all descent, and repeating the same economic blunders as Greenspan and Paulson.

For more information read my report of 22 warnings from major market figures starting in 2000 till the 2008 meltdown. My summary includes warnings by one SEC chairman, two Fed Governors, five leading economists, four billionaires, five money managers overseeing trillions, two leading financial historians, and many more not on the list. 20 reasons a new mega-bubble will pop in 2011.

All their warnings were ignored, lied about and covered up by Greenspan, Paulson and all the other Reaganomics Brain ideologues running Washington and Wall Street the past generation. But soon a powerful revolution will stop the lies and the cover-ups.

Is Farrell being unduly alarmist? Perhaps. Then again, few predicted the tsunami of "liberation" that is sweeping MENA, and soon Asia. The precedent has been set, and it is slowly but surely moving toward the west. With the relentless theft from the middle class by the oligarchy accelerating, and appreciated by everyone, sooner or later there will be nothing left in the great American welfare state to keep the zombified Joe Sixpeasant satiated. At that point all bets will be off.

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Farrell has been ranting about Reaganomics since MW gave him his bully-pulpit. It goes back further than Reagan. It goes all the way back to the establishment of the Fed and the delinking of the dollar to gold during the Nixon regime. Reagan was just another fool along the way, frankly not much different than any of the fools after him nor those before him.

Sorry, I have to disagree. Farrell has hit upon a key point, and I have to say that I'm impressed with him once more. But he doesn't quite nail the central concept. And that is, we're in the Financialization phase of the current economic cycle. I.e. once we moved from making money out of producing things, we moved on to making money out of money. This is the central theme of the 1980's, and it's in this phase that we've seen the ridiculous rise of all the various financialization schemes and products. As well as the move of production offshore. And the various Ponzi credit schemes required to keep this game going.

There was an excellent book written about this a couple years ago. Alas, I've forgotten the title at the moment, but I've found it useful and most descriptive to see things from this angle, if you want to understand what's going on in terms of the big picture. You can see that what we're going through is basically the same old long term economic cycle that we've always gone through. The last Financialization phase ended in the Great Depression, and this one will not end differently.

Now, this isn't to dismiss your points about the Federal Reserve and the Gold Standard. Rather, I'd view the impacts of these on top of the Financial nonsense that has arisen since the 1980's.

strongly agree. unfortunately, farrells focus on the "reaganomics" descriptive takes away from the point of his article and those fond of reagan will be sidetracked even though farrell describes obama as acting via the "reaganomics brain."

i also agree that the financialization (this time inflationary) is the product of 1971, while the 1920s financialization was more the result of then fed easy money policies (busted by deflationary effect of sounder money gold standard).

"I.e. once we moved from making money out of producing things, we moved on to making money out of money."

That's about the crux of it. You have those in banking who can actually just create the giant pool of money/debt, plus other rent seekers who know how to hang around between the spigot and the rest of us. They get rich just grabbing easy scraps as the invented money/debt flows out to the people.

Then they figure out that the larger and larger this pool of debt gets, the more scraps they can grab from their position by the spigot. So as far as they care, the pool of debt ought to be as big as an ocean. Heck, two oceans! And the spigot should be replaced with a fire hose. And hey, they aren't greedy. All they ask is a mere 1% of everything that flows by.

All the Whores of the Beltway have been owned by Bankers who then used them and abused them for thier whole 4 - 8 year shelf life...

Clinton / Obama / Bush 1 / Bush 2.. all the same.. the last one to buck the status quo was shot forwards, backwards and sideways... all from behind in Texas. Now I realize the 6.5 Creedmor is a nasty round, but it aint magic.

Trying to pin something this systemic on one president or another is a waste of time. There has been complicity across the board. In all three branches of goverment.

We use to produce things and sell them abroad, thus bringing new wealth into the country. Now we all do "services" for each other, passing the same buck back and forth. One big circle jerk with little genuine wealth creation. So we started borrowing it instead.

Wow. I really had to say that I'm impressed by the thoughtfulness and the discussion in the replies. It's incredibly refreshing to see, instead of the ad hominems, "* b*tches" and other comments which really don't advance a discussion, nor offer insight to it.

I enjoy getting intelligent feedback on my own thoughts and views, and am not disappointed here.

First, who is responsible for the spending bills. Not the president. Remember that drunk - Tip O'Neal - another Massoftwoshits product (Barney Frank is the cocksucking version of the same and fat old eddie renting out the whore house for the night - sounds like fun until you get the phone call from the doctor saying you need to come back to the office as soon as you get back from driving Mary Jo home) - he started and led the spending spree (Laffer curve is right) that every congress has followed since (oh yeah, there was a piece of shit president from Texas - no not W - LBJ - why are the presidents from texas known by letters instead of names - that's right - all taxassholes have nicknames that could have been used in Deliverance - that started the not-so great society - what a misnamed boondoogle that fucks the budget up forever - risk shifted retirement from individual and families and put it on the goberment). Pre-dating Regan was Volker. He saved the day - a Carter appointee (worst president ever) - that raised interest rates as needed (soon to be done again by the market). Regan had the right ideas but the wrong supporting cast - tip was charlie sheen and regan was john crier. Tip won by spending everthing regan's policies created.

have you noticed that whenever these gurus rail about everything that is wrong or broken with the system, obamas name almost never shows up. most of this country is still under the trance of some bizarre race guilt thing that is inexplicable. that is what enables anyone in the current admin to respond to any question or criticism with knee jerk charges of racism. many will be blaming bush and reagan to the gates of hell

Reagan was the one who took debt structuring to a whole new level.. the art of engineering long term debt disguised as a Bond.. for national interests, roadways and such.. think strucutred debt increased by 3,000% in 8 years and from there, kept going.. and before Reagan, no structured debt to that scope and scale in history.

You have the hue of an ex or soon to be ex-republican.. the only thing you need to know is.. follow the money... http://www.opensecrets.org/ an spoiler alert! no matter who you love, they are an owned whore who belongs to the Lobby..

Partly Yes. Regan planted the seeds for the out of control deficit spending. That's why I prayed the big bubbles, aided by the federal reserve, would blow up on a republican president and they did. The NASDAQ and the housing bubbles blew up on George Bush. Thank you God.

Obama is.. lil Bush part deux in technicolor... all of Bush's programs.. have been extended beyond Bush's wildest dreams.. but understand.. there is no difference between any of the beltway gang, they are all owned.. and the NSA / FBI / CIA who should be keeping "We the People" safe from this large scale shit.. are in on the take.. sweet private sector jobs await all those in the know.

the NSA / FBI / CIA who should be keeping "We the People" safe from this large scale shit.. are in on the take..

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The alphabet agencies have never been the friend of the people. The same goes for all government agency's and armed services. They are all self serving entities that do the government's bidding for a regular pay check. Increasing the bureaucracy increases the pay check. Everyone wants in on the top quartile.

It is / was the press and news media outlets who were the watch-dog, but they were hijacked years ago, by their now owners the military \ industrial \ congressional complex.

None of this is new! It's just now the wheels are falling off, poor people are awakening from the self induced hypnosis of "I'm alright Jack"

Altruistic Socialism mixed with a huge demand for profit, is the idealistic hammer that has brought the world to the brink, not a single player, party line or religious fundamentalism. In short globalism sucks.

What a stupid article. As Alex Jones constantly says (who is sometimes annoying, I know), "Don't fall into the left/right paradigm." It's Fed-o-nomics and spend-o-nomics that has bankrupted this country. If it's not the left spending on wars and half-baked social programs, it's the right who make up excuses to invade foreign countries and feed the companies of death. The only constant, aid to Israel and the constant clicking of the printing presses creating more and more money.

“It’s a way to get investors focus on the good,” said Paul Miller, a former examiner with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and analyst at FBR Capital Markets in Arlington, Virginia. “It’s a way to talk about good things and ignore the bad.”

The "balance of power" is an illusion. The game is designed so that as the pendulum swings from Left to Right, tyranny is ratcheted up. Tyranny of the left = socialism/communism, tyranny of the right = "security" and war.

The ratchet only goes in one direction --> more tyranny. Haven't you noticed that when the "Left" is in power, they never undo all the bad things that the "Right" put in place... and vice-versa? Never backward, always forward, until total enslavement.

When the pendulum passes through the center point of the arc, the ratchet is still, creating the illusion of "better times" for a brief period.

The clinton 'balanced budget' was accounting trickery. We haven't had a true balanced budget in this country recognizing all liabilities for a few generations now.

As for this article, it was ridiculously generalized. Made it seem like a lame hit piece. Instead of just invoking reagan's policy, he should have went into detail about specific parts of reagan's philosophy.

Exactly my thoughts. I'm guessing that Farrel had a deadline and, with no research, just started typing. The result is a lot of "heat," but little "light" - which, fortunately, many posters have provided.

No you can't blame Reaganomics. We're at this situation in time because we as voters have allowed it. We have voted in politicians who have given us everything we've wanted, never turning down a request for funds, earmarks or pork. The majority of us have been financially irresposnible and same with politicians from both sides of the aisle. Everyone one of us is or has been part of a constituency be it professional, civic, ethnic, etc. Whenever we needed something, our spokesgroup went to our representative, our senator or agency and asked for it.

Well, lo & behold, soon 30+ years of this add up. The total public debt on 12/31/88, Reagan's last full year was $2,431,715,000,000. On 12/31/11, it was $14,025,215,000,000. In that time period we have had George W.H. Bush, William J. Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama. Three full terms by the Republicans, two and a half by the Democrats. It seems ludicris to blame Reagan, we only have to look in the mirror.

You guys are missing the point. The mind set of USA changed with Reaganomics. Deregulation, in 1984, started giving more and more power to shareholders. The quarterly report became king. Short term financial horizon in corporates. 15% ATROE the norm. The finacial market, the junk bonds, "greed is good" the norm. The corporate culture changed and Greenspan, when he came in in 1987, supplemented it with cheap money, plenty of it. That's Reaganomics, that mind set, that culture. It killed corporate USA's vision from business cycle to bubble cycle, made it shot termed, made 'casino royal' the Mantra. From then on it went like bad to worse. WAll Street fed on the steroids of cheap money and more and more asset risky asset inflation.Even the notational companies joined the party. You don't build a Ponzi scheme of this size without first eroding DUE DILIGENCE in the whole financial sector over 20 year: 1984-2004, before things exploded in final count down to sub prime mayhem and bank default 2008. Now the crippling denial to oblivion.

Sorry, but you've missed a very important point. Deregulation does not serve shareholders, it serves MANAGEMENT.

You need to understand that the game is Corporate Mangement vs. Corporate Shareholders... and Management is winning. Management has been looting shareholders for decades. It really got bad in the dotcom era... stock options have gutted shareholder value.

In certain old-line industries, Management and Labor have teamed up to loot the Shareholders. GM is the perfect example of corrupt management teaming up with corrupt unions to drive a company into the ground and not just loot the shareholders, but bondholders and taxpayers as well... GM was the trifecta of looting, the perfect "bust-out" and it was Obama's proudest moment in his quest to destroy the american economy.

Calling this "Reaganomics" is an insult to Reagan and really is ignorant... the process may have picked up some steam his watch, but it really accelerated under Clinton and Bush 2. And it started back in the 19th century when the laws governing corporations were gradually changed over a period of 100 years from being VERY corporation-unfriendly to VERY corporation-friendly.

yee-haw, u go Buckaroo. And the "corporate management" is a very small slice of that management. With captive "auditors" who say things like "well, we should be able to get over with that position." Bastards.

More like the FDR + The Great Society (great leap backwards) and the lurch towards socialist promises that couldn't be kept, guided by the social engineering 'geniuses' whose slide rules didn't take into account that the baby boomers would eventually stop paying and start collecting.

Besides, Reagan never got to finish what he started because of the democrat congress. His second act was always going to be massive cuts in the government budget but he could never get the agenda past the congress.

Reagan didn't do shit after Hinckley shot him. De Boyz took over then (as if they weren't already substantially in charge). Reagan then went back to what he did best, i.e. third rate actor/soap (and Star Wars) peddler. Reagan had the advantage of being able to "communicate" with the mindless fucking idiots that watch the tube 6 hours a day. The Great Communicator. Win one for the Gipper.

Please, the Pugs controlled the Senate from '82 to '87 and approved higher budgets than the ever-increasing proposals from Reagan the entire time. The only reason Reagan didn't get to "finish what he started" was term limits of the presidency. Not once during that time did he send a proposal to congress which wasn't higher than the last. Not once. His first in '82 was $507B and his last was $621B despite gutting tax revenues while performing Laffer's 'voodoo' chants. His deficits and doubling of the national debt don't lie. From $987B to $2.85T (notice the 'T' there). From 33.3% debt to GDP to 51.8% of GDP by '88.

Time to let go of your fantasy-colored remembrance of the past and embrace your responsibility in helping our country along to the disaster we've found ourselves in today.

Are Pugs gonna go back on their "he spent it all to win the cold war" routine and rob him of his legacy?

The Federal Reserve was a rather benign institution from 1913 until 1980. Volcker was its last hero. What really took America down was that charlatan, Arthur Laffer. Sure, it's sounds charming to cut taxes, but the voters quickly figured out they could borrow instead.

The Fed is benign like a melanoma on the top of Bernanke's head. Volcker killed inflation by crushing gold and continuing our lives as economic serfs instead of reestablishing a gold standard with a new gold price north of $800.

The architect of Reagonomics was really Milton Friedman. Laffer, like Thomas Sowell, were followers of the late great Milton Friedman.

Friedman turned socialist Chile around when they had 1000% inflation -- they now have a soveriegn wealth fund to invest. He also advised communist China about the same time on how to run a market economy back in the early 80's, with amazing results. America has incrementally moved to a social welfare-state with disasterous results.

Milton pounds Donahue that we're all greedy little bastards at heart and "Wall Street" turns greed into an icon. Meanwhile, the antonym of greed, generosity and compassion, are no longer part of the lighthouse on the hill. Do you honestly believe this is what the Founding Fathers intended? I can tell you one thing, for sure, if we abandon our generosity and compassion for greed, no one will want to come here anymore and we're no better than Russia.

This really shouldn't be news to any ZH'ers. Farrell's taking a little risk by identifying Reaganomics by the name of the blessed saint. A black-belt paleo-con like Paul Craig Roberts would take umbrage at this Ponzi scam being referred to as "ultra-conservative," no doubt.

Farrell's overall message that the game is rigged and the taint isn't out of the blood yet therefore the real collapse is yet to come? Not much to argue with there.

My vote for the soon to be needed $1000 bill, after all, we would not need it if it were not for him.

They is no coincidence that the wheels starting coming off when he assumed office, the mantra of debt being wealth was created. And it was all down hill...

The goddam parasites and gamers took advantage of Ronnie and his misguided understanding of regulation combined with the naive economic philosophy of his Supply Siders. These geniuses could not grasp that productive capital and economic rents cannot be taxed on an equal footing. They are not equivalent. This has led to self-reinforcing shitshow we are now in...

The turn on of Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea gave us a second chance, in the 70's we figured out that burning oil for electricity was asinine. We got a cushion. Ronnie though the free market would give us cheap oil forever, after all its the fucking American way....

The best way to compare Reagan and Carter is that in a Hold em' game, Carter drew an off-suit 3-4 and played it less than stellerly, where Ronnie was dealt a pair of Aces and still managed to fuck it up....

anti-establishment media mogul Conrad Black was taken out with accountancy rules, not the Comms Act. His jailing by the crooked politico-media establishment for balance sheet operations that would make Wall Street piss their pants at the triviality of it all gave the parasites carte blanche more than anything to then step on the gas pedal to non-stop wall-to-wall propaganda.

The media campaign pre/during/post Presidential elections for Obumma is the biggest blanket and ongoing lie in political history. This Chicago Commie can't get through a Press breifing without an auto-cue he's such a lame weak puppet of his parasite handlers ...the Marxist muppet needs nappies

The thing Carter was guilty of was appointing Burns who was in over is head as Fed Chair. No defense of that. In some fairness, he inherited the bills from Vietnam. He fixed the problem with the Fed by appointing Volcker, who by all accounts was the best Fed Chairman. Look at oil production along with the Iranian revolution, hardly things Carter could control and as I said above Ronnie inherited the turn on Alaska and the North Sea.

Reagan cut the Wounded Vets pay checks, my Uncle was shot in the head in Nam.. he came to live with us becuase Reagan said he was milking the system... fucking ak-47 to the fucking head and my uncle a Recondo Ranger was milking the system, FUCK REAGAN!!!

Whenever someone rants on about "Reaganomics" or "Obamanomics" or whatever,

I can't put much faith in their reasoning. Particularly, as many have noted, the

prolfigate spending and feckless regulation of the financial industry have been a

bipartisan affair (and I say that as a fully, partisan, person).

Maybe Farrell is right but nothing is stated here by which one can reasonably blame

the entire, current, fiasco on Reagan's doorstep.

If anything, Reagan showed more guts than any 20th century president by letting Volker do the tightening he did that arrested inflation in the early 80's. No interference from Reagan, rhetorical or otherwise through what was an unprecedented, and much needed, Fed tightening move.

I guess no one remembers the heaping pile Reagan inherited from Carter? How convenient. Carter inherited from Ford who got it from Nixon who got it from LBJ who got the heaping pile from Kennedy... Get the picture. Exactly at what point in time in the last 100 years has any president gotten a great econcomy. Please don't say Bush jr from Clinton as that would too be intellectually dishonest. Anyone remember the collapse of dot com in 1999? So who is really to blame? Hoover?

The point is that no generation is happy about society, the economy, healthcare, education, immigration, bankers, unions etc... It appears to be just the way of the world. Oddly enough it appears the same old complaints get passed down from one generation to the next. Yes even during Camelot's time, if you pick up any paper the day before he was shot, there were the same complaints then as there are now. There has always been the have and the have nots and there always will be. Fair or not it doesn't matter. Unlike the revisionitst history Kennedy was no great president. He certainly didn't get into the civil rights frey for what ever reason, most of the gains happened under LBJ. Kennedy was just as big of a douche as the rest only he got better poon than the others. Can you imagine him with Lewinsky? Fact is America has been on a downward spiral since Washington left office. Each year more and more rights being ceded to the government and more and more wealth stolen from the people by the government. It's a zero sum game the people vs the govt and the government is determined to win.

Funny, Nixon ended Vietnam which Kennedy started and escalated with the "advisors" and Reagan ended the cold war that JFK escalated to it's most dangerous heights yet Kennedy is somehow the golden boy in your eyes.

Actually Ike and JFK were a welcome break between FDR and LBJ. There is a reason why JFK got shot. And Ike had the common courtesy to warn us about the Military-Industrial complex (he originally called it the Military-Congressional-Industrial complex, but took out the Congressional part because he thought that including them would be so controversial it would draw attention away from the message he was trying to communicate).

Mr Farrell needs to replace "Reaganomics" with Governmoronics for this topic has nothing to do with any single politician but with a bankrupt corrupt failed parasitical system called "democratic government". Otherwise he's just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic

it fails and is baked-in-corrupt because it is a monopoly system. Monopolies, public or private, always produce crap and always allow their operatives to go off the rails (the precise behaviour of Washington and the EU as we speak). That is the problem that society has to address because the problem is for society to solve as Govt never will (Turkeys don't vote for Christmas do they?).

End the monopoly (parasite) on society. Replace with a competitive free market model and a free society. Freedom works. All authority and centralised structures produce absolute bollocks... let's give a free society a chance, it couldn't possibly be any fuking worse now could it?

This just really pisses me off. These legislative clowns are going to delay the reduction of fees because cry baby JP Morgue may lose 12 billion dollars of revenue. When will this stop? When will our government be caputured back by it's citizens?

there was a customer demo very recently that shut a Bank of America branch over forclosurefrauds.... that's the way to do it, gather the pitchforks

...alternatively in the patent absence of the Law, the regulators and the US Govt you can just leave it to Father Time and the customers and investors to sue the arse out of these big Wall Street fraudsters... the Govt stinks we know that but you can trust in the private sector to take these big MF's down one by one ...not long to wait, pitchfork ready?

Reagan's tax cuts and coming up with the idea of robbing social security to pay for them is why I started buying silver at $5 an ounce. I knew it was going to catch up to us someday. I also really thought when he started sending stinger missiles to mess with the Russians in Afghanistan it would be something that might bite us in the ass. I don't think he was as great a president as many want to think

Yeah, he was loved by the same people that love Dancing with the Stars and the ones that figured out it was going to be "Sauve qui Peut"...but he did more to put this country on the road to perdition than anyone in history...

It actually takes this long or even longer for wealth building infrastructure to decay - there was no programme of replacement and no capital spent on new technology so now we are going to pay for the over consumption of the past at the expense of real wealth capital to drive future wealth.

For decades we have listened to the mantra that Nuclear takes too long blah blah blah - well now welcome to the future baby - shit ain't it.

The Challenger disaster was also illustrative of a lack of imagination and elan in America of the time - instead of recognizing that the Shuttle was a bastard of a design and a Turkey at best they kept on ploughing into the abyss.

Monetarists suck - they just shuffle the credits until the money / energy runs out.

Where is the balance between greed and compassion? Is Christ still relevant to the discussion? Can someone else provide the correct paradigm? If no one can, we're doomed to tear at opposite sides of greed and compassion for eternity.

While there were huge innovations in the financial services industry under Reagan, such as the advent of money market funds and other deregulatory advances, I don't see how Reagan can be blamed.

I'd say the collapse of Bretton Woods, which took the dollar off the gold standard and instituted floating exchange rates, has resulted in a huge shift of wealth from Americans to firms that "cheat" and don't allow a free float. That's what has caused the huge global imbalances. Blaming Reagan only makes sense if you're a flaming liberal like Ferrell who simply wants to damage Regan's legacy.